An Enduring Quest: The Story Of Purdue Industrial Engineers

By Ferd Leimkuhler

The process of industrialization that began over two hundred years ago is continuing to change the way people work and live, and doing it very rapidly, in places like China and India. At the forefront of this movement is the profession of industrial engineering that develops and applies the technology that drives industrialization. This book describes how industrial engineering evolved over the past two centuries developing methods and principles for the planning, design, and control of production and service systems. The story focuses on the growth of the discipline at Purdue University where it helped shape the university itself and made substantial contributions to the industrialization of America and the world. The story includes colorful and creative people like Frank and Lillian Gilbreth of Cheaper by the Dozen fame. Lillian was the first lady of American engineering as well a founder of Purdue's Industrial Engineering.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Release date: Jul 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781557539182

Book preview

Author’s Preface

While aimed at engineers and students interested in the field, the author hopes this book will help others understand how the industrialization of America came about and helped changed the world. Because of its profound effect on our everyday life, this technology is much too important to be left to engineers alone. Everyone needs to participate in a free and open discussion of how technology is used, and I hope this book will contribute to such a conversation.

Writing the book was a way of saying thanks to my many students and colleagues, and to my teachers, Howard Ellis, Rob Roy, George Hawkins, Philip Morse, and Moshe Barash. I am very grateful to people at Purdue who helped in this effort, especially Charlotte Erdmann, Dianna Gilroy, Dan Folta, Sammie Morris, and Nagabhushana Prabhu. Special thanks go to my wife, Natalie, for her encouragement and patience, daughters Meg and Jeanne, and above all to my son Tom who was chief critic, editor, and muse.

Ferd Leimkuhler

Berkeley, 2009

Foreword by Steven C. Beering

It was nearly forty years ago when I first met Sam Regenstrief. He was an enterprising small-town manufacturer of dishwashers who proposed that we approach the management of health care in the same way that he produced the working parts of dishwashers. On the surface, his suggestion seemed preposterous. He was persistent, however, and even offered to fund a building to house an outpatient clinic and a center for healthcare research at the Indiana University School of Medicine. In due course we assembled a number of very bright young Purdue industrial engineers who, together with a cadre of committed internal medicine professors, created the Regenstrief Institute and Clinic and revolutionized our handling of outpatients and their records. As a classically educated physician and medical school dean, I knew about individual patient care, but had not appreciated the powerful influence of industrial engineering. Today we employ interdisciplinary approaches in medicine and basic science and we are proud of the contributions of systems research to hospital management and health care delivery.

Dr. Ferd Leimkuhler, pioneering professor of industrial engineering, has chronicled the remarkable history of this discipline at Purdue University and in America. His encyclopedic account is fascinating both in breadth and detail. He carefully describes the profound contributions of industrial engineering to the resolution of many major societal problems over the past fifty years. We can now earnestly hope that the lessons learned will be applied to addressing global crises in the environment, energy, and the world economy. Fundamental to our collective future welfare will be a re-emphasis of education at all levels. We have the knowledge, the skills, and the means to succeed.

Steven C. Beering, President Emeritus, Purdue University

Foreword by Gerald Nadler

I was introduced to Purdue in July sixty-five years ago, in 1943. The US Navy V-12 program assigned me there from the mechanical engineering (ME) program I had started at the University of Cincinnati. Little did I know how that transfer would so dramatically affect my life. The ME bachelor’s degree I received two years later would have been rather uneventful if it hadn’t given me the opportunity to take Marvin Mundel’s motion and time study course as an elective in my last semester. It opened my eyes to the wonderful perspectives of industrial engineering and led me to pursue graduate studies in that burgeoning field.

The early maturation period for the IE profession was a most exciting time to enter the IE graduate program at Purdue. My fellow graduate students at one time or another (Janet Armstrong, Irving Lazarus, Robert Lehrer, Donald Malcolm, and Harold Smalley, to name a few I remember) were equally engaged in assuring that the profession would become a major program at Purdue and in the engineering world at large.

The faculty members (Harold Amrine, Robert Fields, Lillian Gilbreth, Marvin Mundel, Halsey Owen, and Wally Richardson) also made us feel we were pioneers in the emerging formalization of industrial engineering educational programs as a foundation for the IE profession. Lillian Gilbreth was a great inspiration to all of us as we discussed what IE should be. We were early enthusiasts when the American Institute of Industrial Engineers was founded in 1948. That Purdue set up its IE program a few years after I and my fellow graduate students moved on made me proud that we had perhaps helped put a foundation under what has now become a premier school of industrial engineering.

I watched with pleasure as Harold Amrine led Purdue’s IE program through adolescence and was especially delighted when Ferd Leimkuhler’s long period of leadership brought the program to its outstanding adulthood. He is to be highly complimented on the history he has prepared. It is particularly valuable because of his explanation of the larger societal context that led to the profession of IE as well as its trajectory at Purdue. Anyone in the field in addition to those with some association with Purdue will benefit from the insights in this book.

Gerald Nadler

The political upheaval of the American Revolution in 1776 coincided with a wave of manufacturing innovation in Great Britain that crossed the ocean and became a major factor in the growth of the new nation. In the two centuries after its founding, America went from being an essentially agrarian society to being an unrivaled industrial powerhouse. At the forefront of this change were industrial engineers who created the large-scale production and service systems that are basic to modern society.

Today a new era of innovation is underway that is transforming American industry, making it more flexible, decentralized, and knowledge intensive. The present dependence on materials, energy, labor, and capital is giving way to the development of new ways to exploit information and knowledge resources. Industrial engineers are helping to meet this challenge through their experience in designing large-scale systems for global production of goods and services and their unique interest in the interaction of humans and technology.

This book describes how industrial engineering evolved over the past two centuries by telling the story of its growth at Purdue University, where it helped shape the University itself and made essential contributions to the field. The term industrial engineering came into popular use around 1900 and was first used to describe a course at Purdue in 1908, a professorship in 1919, graduate degrees in 1937, and bachelor’s degrees in 1955. When first taught in 1879, it was called practical mechanics, and later, general engineering, before these programs were merged into the School of Industrial Engineering we know today.

The events that led up to Purdue opening its doors in 1874 started a century earlier in Great Britain with a manufacturing revolution that began at the time of the American Revolution. In 1776, Adam Smith made an epic study, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, in which he said that the increase in manufacturing productivity in factories was due to a combination of new work methods and machine tools. Two outstanding inventors at the time were Henry Maudslay in England and Eli Whitney in America. Maudslay’s amazingly accurate lathe became the model for developing the English system of precision manufacturing that enabled Britain to excel in bringing steam power to factories, railroads, and ships.

Whitney invented the cotton gin and a multitooled milling machine, but his greater accomplishment was conceiving the American system of mass production in which the work of a master craftsman was divided into a sequence of tasks so that unskilled workmen using special tools could make an acceptable replica of a masterwork. With mass production and his earlier invention of the cotton gin, which enabled the South to sell cotton to England, Whitney almost single-handedly revived the American economy after the Revolutionary War and set the course of its industrial development through the Civil War and into the twentieth century.

Mass production in factories was started in 1771 by the entrepreneur Richard Arkwright who began spinning cotton in a carefully managed mill. He was the first to use James Watt’s steam engine in a factory setting and planned the New Lanark Mill, Britain’s largest, later owned by Robert Owen. The factory system had a social result that was much more significant than the outpouring of consumer goods. It broke the grip of the craft guilds over manufacturing and prompted an exodus of workers from farms to factories. Factories became, in effect, public schools to teach trades to young people who wanted to escape medieval farm life even at the high cost of uncertain employment and poor working and living conditions in factory towns.

It later came to be seen that mastering the new factory technology was a way to teach engineering design to beginning students in the new public technical schools created after the Civil War. Teaching factories in the form of huge laboratory buildings with large power plants became a hallmark of engineering campuses, as represented by three prominent Purdue buildings: Mechanics Hall, Old Heavilon Hall, and Michael Golden Hall.

William Goss built the first such teaching laboratory at Purdue and opened its doors in 1879. He said:

During the first three years of Purdue’s existence the task of finding out what it should be proved insurmountable, and during this period of uncertainty Purdue was operated under a plan not materially different from that of other colleges in the state. It was not until 1879 that the trustees made a plunge. They announced for that year a course in Agriculture and a course in Mechanic Arts, and as it happened, I, a youth not yet twenty appeared in the fall of that year to clothe in flesh the conception of a new faith so far as the Mechanic Arts were concerned.¹

Goss used practical mechanics as a foundation for a comprehensive engineering program that would become one of the world’s largest. It would fulfill President Emerson White’s plan to make Purdue a shining example of a new kind of industrial college which would take its place beside the classical college in popular esteem. Its diploma will be honored, he said, as the evidence of a different but equally fruitful education.² The early history of Purdue’s engineering program—and the parts played by Goss and White—is recounted in chapter 2.

Another unique and important figure emerged, around 1900, in the person of Frederick Taylor who, like an Old Testament prophet, pointed to the waste and inefficiency in factories and started a crusade for the adoption of what he called scientific management. Taylor’s idea was to have a team of engineers make observations and measurements that could be used to design a factory so that it would run like a well-oiled machine. The Ford assembly line introduced in 1913 became a popular symbol of the efficient factory that Taylor predicted would benefit owners with higher profits, workers with higher pay, and consumers with lower prices.

Management theorist Peter Drucker believed Taylor should get most of the credit for the astounding growth of real income in Europe and America depicted in Figure 1A.

Figure 1A. Growth of real income per person in England from 1500 to 2000 with a relative income level of 100 in 1860³

Darwin, Marx, and Freud form the trinity often cited as the makers of the modern world. Marx would be taken out and replaced by Taylor if there were any justice in the world. But, that Taylor is not given his due, is a minor matter. It is a serious matter however, that far too few people realize both machines and capital investment were as plentiful before 1880 as they have been since, but there was absolutely no increase in worker productivity during the first hundred years of the Industrial Revolution and consequently very little increase in workers’ real incomes or any decrease in their working hours. What made the second hundred years so critically different can only be explained as the result of applying knowledge to work.

Few figures in intellectual history have had a greater impact than Taylor and few have been so willfully misunderstood. Neither the right nor the left will forgive him for proving that capitalism and socialism are irrelevant, only productivity is important, and owners have duties not rights, and workers have responsibilities not chains. Intellectuals resent his use of science for something as trivial as ordinary work because they think work is something slaves do.⁴

Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, two of Taylor’s associates, advanced and improved the scientific management movement by addressing the important human questions that it raised. The Gilbreths laid the foundation not only for the academic discipline of industrial engineering but also for the fields of industrial psychology, industrial sociology, industrial physiology, and industrial management. Frank Gilbreth focused on the physiological aspects of work methods and measurement, and Lillian concentrated on the psychological issues of worker participation in the operation and management of industrial enterprises.

The technical and economic benefits of scientific management caused its quick adoption in the industrial buildup before World War I. After the war, the widespread unemployment resulting from the collapse of industry led to European efforts like socialism and communism to revive industry. In America, the engineer Herbert Hoover was elected president leading a campaign to eliminate waste in industry using Taylor’s ideas. After the stock market crash of 1929 and his defeat in 1932, Hoover’s plan became Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal with more union and government control. Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich describes the outcome:

America’s prosperity was a product of the alliance between high-volume machinery and large-scale organization which was forged by scientific management.… Capital intensive industries like steel, automobiles, chemicals, textiles, rubber, and electrical equipment combined large-scale machine production with scientific management to achieve extraordinary efficiency.… America became the envy of the world.⁵

Because of their close friendship with Dean A. A. Potter, the Gilbreths lectured regularly at Purdue for over forty years, guiding the development of the industrial engineering program. As a distinguished faculty member from 1935 to 1947, Lillian worked with Purdue’s first professors of industrial engineering, George Shepard and Frank Hockema, to establish an IE program that had a major influence on the teaching of job design and production management. Chapters 3 and 4 examine how industrial engineering developed from the wellspring of scientific management.

In the 1940s, the involvement of engineering schools in the war effort and especially in the postwar national science programs led to a major change in engineering education as it shifted its focus to graduate study and research sponsored by the federal government. As elsewhere, Purdue’s undergraduate programs became more science based and oriented toward graduate work. Separate programs in business management and shop technology were developed. Two leaders in that change at Purdue were Frederick Hovde and George Hawkins. Hovde was head of the nation’s rocket program at the end of the war, and, when he came to Purdue as president in 1946, he transformed it into a research university. Hawkins followed Potter, becoming Dean of Engineering in 1953.

Hovde and Hawkins began to divide general engineering into three schools—management, technology, and industrial engineering—under separate deans. The plan of study for the BSIE degree introduced in 1955 reflected Hawkins’s emphasis on science, systems, and interdisciplinary research and conformed to the new definition of the field that was formulated by the Institute of Industrial Engineers.⁶ The transition to the new IE program was made under the first two school heads, Harold Amrine and the author, who led the program for a combined thirty-two years.

Operations research was the most prominent new addition to the curriculum at that time, providing a strong applied mathematics foundation for all of the IE areas and also a fertile area for theoretical research. OR originated in Great Britain during World War II and was first developed in America at MIT, Case Institute, and Johns Hopkins University, led by Phillip Morse, C. West Churchman, and Robert Roy, respectively. Roy used operations research as the foundation for the IE graduate program at Hopkins and his approach was quickly adopted around the country.

Chapters 5 through 8 describe the development of Purdue’s IE program in four main application areas: operations research, manufacturing, human factors, and systems engineering. Each chapter begins with an account of national growth in the area and then describes the contributions made by Purdue’s faculty in teaching and research. Chapter 9 gives an overview of the professional accomplishments of the School’s thousands of alumni, many of whom have made significant technical and social contributions. It is not possible to identify all of them individually, so they are represented by the stories of certain outstanding alumni that are indicative of the character and direction of the practice of industrial engineering.

In chapter 10 we look at the future of the field. By its very nature industrial engineering is future oriented and tries to anticipate how a proposed system may have to adapt to new conditions. This is not an easy task since historians agree that unpredictability is the dominant characteristic of industrial technology, not only in regard to what and when will be the next major breakthrough but how such innovations will ultimately be used by society.

The computer is an outstanding example of technological surprise. In 1952, the author heard John Mauchly tell about building the first functional electronic computer, the ENIAC, at the University of Pennsylvania in 1942 for the Army to calculate artillery ballistic tables. It was the forerunner of the first commercial computer, the UNIVAC, like the one Purdue purchased in 1960. Astonishing as it sounds today, Mauchly said that he and his partner, J. P. Eckert, thought the market for their invention would be very limited because they could think of few other applications that would require such a massive amount of calculations.

After IBM correctly foresaw and won the market for large mainframe computers from UNIVAC, it waited seven years before entering the booming minicomputer market. Later, when IBM dominated the market for desktop computers, they failed to anticipate how important software would become. And, famously, Microsoft did not foresee the popularity of the Web or the search algorithms that Google pioneered.

The American composer John Adams, in his autobiography Hallelujah Junction, describes the impact of sound recording on twentieth century musical culture as so profound that historians have not even begun to analyze its effect.

The invention of sound reproduction is the historical dividing line between the Old World and the New World of music. Recordings, radio transmission, microphones, and loudspeakers radically changed how music is consumed and facilitated the rise of what we now know as popular culture.… Even though I heard live concerts from time to time, 90 percent of the virgin experiences I had with the classical canon, not to mention the great works of American jazz, came through the small speakers of a hi-fi set, later replaced by a stereo system. By comparison, an adolescent Aaron Copeland, living at the time of the First World War, could have only have heard a symphonic work by attending a live concert, and chances were slender that the performance would be at the level of a Toscanini recording.⁷

In addition to its impact on listeners, Adams remarks on how new technologies change the creation of music:

The marriage of the machine to the musical experience is no more and no less than the machine’s intrusion into all other parts of our lives. It can, as is often warned, be a source of corruption of the art form.… But, at the same time new technologies can be a stimulus for new modes of aesthetic experience and novel creative impulses. Artists should take each new step in the evolution of these machines and turn them into instruments of divine play. It’s what we do.⁸

David Nye, in his history of technology development, Technology Matters, argues that technology is unpredictable because it is not merely a mechanical process but an expression of a social world: A fundamentally new invention often has no immediate impact; people need time to find out how they want to use it. Indeed, the best technologies at times fail to win acceptance. Furthermore, the meanings and uses people give to technologies are often unexpected and non-utilitarian.⁹ Inventions emerge as the expression of social forces, personal needs, technical limits, markets, and political considerations, as well as from the ideas of a small group of people. Once a basic design is accepted, innovations in production and usage become the dominant determinants of how a technology unfolds.

Nye cites the bicycle as an example of how, after a period of much innovation, the final modern design emerged in 1890, but the cost was equal to the annual salary of an average worker. In the next twenty years, Schwinn and others developed methods of mass production that reduced the price by a factor of twenty, leading to a huge increase in sales with a significant social impact. In 1896, the feminist Susan B. Anthony declared that bicycling had done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world, because the bicycle craze helped kill the bustle and the corset and win social equality. The networks of bicycle roads built in Denmark and the Netherlands on a scale similar to automobile highways built in the United States are an example of how societies create momentum for particular technologies.

The history of industrialization reflects the interaction of social and technical decision making. Henry Ford’s success was due as much to his marketing genius as to his technical ability. The fact that European factory workers are paid twice what American workers are paid and given health care is not rooted in technology but in cultural values. When the Internet was created, no one anticipated its use for e-mail. As do other technologies, the Internet creates new businesses, opens new social agendas, raises political questions, and requires a supporting infrastructure. Cultures select and shape technology, not the other way around, writes Nye. For millennia, technology has been an essential part of the framework for imagining and moving into the future, but the specific technologies chosen have varied.¹⁰

The engineer’s role in this process is an instrumental one. Humans wanted experts in technology to achieve society’s goals, increase the effectiveness of societal activities, improve the quality of life, enhance human dignity, and develop human capabilities, Gerald Nadler argues.¹¹ Alan Pritsker writes: I interpret industrial engineering to be the process of improving total system performance as measured by economic measures, quality attainment, environmental impacts, and how these relate to the benefit of mankind.¹²

In her memoir, The Quest of the One Best Way, Lillian Gilbreth observes that her colleagues are many workers in many fields of activity, far separated. Some of them have nothing apparently at all in common, except the passion for better methods. They are quest makers, she says, who long for and search for The One Best Way, as described by her in the following lines taken from The Quest. (See Appendix 1B.)

To most of us, life is to some extent a quest,

Many seek little things, some a few great things.

A few seek for one thing only; explorers,

treasure seekers, philosophers, astronomers.

In the old days, treasure, leisure—the knight.

Today, knowledge, work—the engineer.¹³

Gilbreth wrote The Quest in 1924, a high point in the period from 1850 to 1950 that Samuel Florman called "the golden age of